This isn’t a random crank we’re talking about. Robert Fisher is widely acknowledge as one of the foremost scientists in the last 100 years. His contributions to statistics alone would earn him that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher
He was wrong about smoking, but the more you read about him the less you’ll believe it had much to do with money. He was used to being right about so many things, and in this area he was blind.
The article also throws shade at him as a “eugenicist.” I looked it up, and again, the truth is more complex. He wrote this in the 50s:
“I am sorry that there should be propaganda in favour of miscegenation in North America as I am sure it can do nothing but harm. Is it beyond human endeavour to give and justly administer equal rights to all citizens without fooling ourselves that these are equivalent items?”
So first — even using the word “miscegenation” puts you in a bad camp, and there’s no defending his attitude against interracial marriage. OTOH he seemed honestly to believe in the “equal rights” part, too. Too much of the old British “white man’s burden” bullshit, I believe.
Modern connotations of the word "miscegenation aside" aside (the word's denotation means "mixing of races", which is exactly the correct terminology for the issue), and laying aside modern understanding of "race" vs "ethnicity",
in Fisher's era racial separatism was considered a solution to racism, not only by White people but also by many leading Black rights activists, such as Malcom X and Muhammad Ali in the Nation of Islam. Ethnonationalism may well be a bad idea in theory or or practice, but it's not purely an oppressor's idea. (It's not obvious that there is any unalloyed good solution to racism and human nature.)
It was common enough at the time to hold the opinion that "mixing of the races" resulted in offspring that were worse than either race.
Frequently expressed across the colonial Commonwealth, Canada to Australia, South Africa and elsewhere.
eg Daisy Bates (sometime wife of Breaker Morant) wrote in the state newspaper in regard of Australian Aborigines:
Aboriginal civil-rights leader, William Harris, wrote an article in response and said bi-racial Aboriginal people could be of value to Australian society. Bates replied, "as to the half-castes, however early they may be taken and trained, with very few exceptions, the only good half-caste is a dead one."
Miscegenation Laws regarding mixing of races remained in force in Bates part of the world until the 1960s, as did others enforcing the separation of mixed children from their families.
It seems less "a solution to racism" and more an excuse to enforce racist ideas aand attitudes.
Future racism is explored in The Expanse. Humans have colonized the solar system, humans on Earth are on the brink of war with the humans on Mars, and they have slurs for each other.
> in Fisher's era racial separatism was considered a solution to racism
Not just a solution to racism, but also a defense against genocide. Forced interracial "marriages", rape, etc were used as a genocidal tool against the natives along with murder. Natives who refused to mix with whites were derogatorily called racists by the white settlers.
Miscegenation was actually supported by natives, blacks, asians, etc in order preserve their cultures/races in a white dominated nation. Racism ( by all sides ) actually preserved diversity in the US for centuries. Otherwise, everyone would be white due to demographic realities of the nation.
>The article also throws shade at him as a “eugenicist.” I looked it up, and again, the truth is more complex.
You didn't look it up very well.
>In 1911, Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes, R. C. Punnett, and Horace Darwin. After members of the Cambridge Society – including Fisher – stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912, a link was forged with the Eugenics Society (UK).[122] He saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues that encompassed and drove his interest in both genetics and statistics. During World War I Fisher started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal, being hired for a part-time position.
I think that if you:
1. are the founding chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society,
2. stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912,
3. saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues, and
4. started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal
..you are a eugenicist.
My research consisted of clicking on, and reading, the link you yourself posted.
Can you please make your substantive points without crossing into the flamewar style? When someone else is mistaken, it's enough to respectfully explain how they are mistaken.
Tossing in swipes like "You didn't look it up very well", or snark twisters like "My research consisted of clicking on, and reading, the link you yourself posted", is bad for many reasons, including that (1) it degrades the forum; (2) it evokes worse from others; and (3) it discredits your viewpoint, which is particularly bad if it happens to be true.
How else should the parent had framed his comment ? Can you give an example of the correct wording ?
I’m genuinely confused because his comment was valuable to me.
OP had either made an error or was attempting to mislead the audience by downplaying critical facts in his argument and patent highlighted it, which I appreciate because no one has the time to digest all the references.
Cherry picking or skippping over critical context is unhelpful at best or deceptive st worst.
If the comment hadn't started with "You didn't look it up very well" or ended with "My research consisted of clicking on, and reading, the link you yourself posted", both of which were needless swipes, I wouldn't have posted a moderation reply. Does that answer your question?
"I believe this is not the case because: XXX" would be a neutral response. And one that most people would give to most other strangers if they are meeting in real life. But on the internet it happens very often that people aren't actually as respectful as they would be in real life. And it happens very naturally too - I have close friends who have had insane arguments over chat apps which they would never have done in an eye to eye situation.
In general responding with a statement that assigns a quality to someone's work and effort is not appropriate. You can say "That information is not correct" if you want to be assertive but saying "You have not researched or read the correct information" is doing more then correcting information and becomes personal.
I've seen a lot of people, myself included have trouble with this distinction. But I have found it to be an important part of being "considerate" of others and being charismatic to them. People really react differently to the smallest of nuance in tone and wording regardless if they are adults. (I'd actually wager adults react much more strongly to that nuance due to having more experience to tell the nuances apart)
Genuine question. Is it better or worse for a site like HN to have guidelines in place which leads to hypersenstivity when it comes to comments? Aren't we all adults here on this site who should be able to handle some pushback?
My take is that it takes only a small percentage of people to be toxic, for the lack of a better term, for most of the conversation to be toxic. E.g. someone acts inappropriately, then a few people overreact (i.e. follow suit), then whoever isn't interested in thinking in baser terms altogether skips the conversation: ergo, the conversation is dominated by the outraged, divisive minority.
Have you read any thread here on IQ, or immigration, or outsourcing? You can find the most vile, bottom-of-the-barrel opinions there, and the mods don’t give a shit, yet here you have a comment calling out misrepresentation (at best) of facts about eugenics and suddenly dang feels the need to sweep in and tone-police that?
I don't think I have. In those other cases, do you think that dang is being biased towards certain causes, or that he failed to moderate for some more benign reason?
> Aren't we all adults here on this site who should be able to handle some pushback?
Sadly not. I'm tempted to say "most adults aren't adults", but the actual dynamics are more what dmos62 described.
Let's say most of us are adults most of the time, but that gap between "most" and "all" is, given a large-enough population, more than enough to ruin every thread if care isn't taken to avoid this.
Edit: one factor that often goes unappreciated is the size of the community. Small, cohesive communities can support more robust (or even aggressive) styles of interaction—especially when people have other things in common that unite them. In the past I've often compared this to rugby teams [1] that beat the crap out of each other and then go to the pub together; or literary or comedy communities where the art of insulting each other is part of the fun. These dynamics break down completely in a context like HN, where the group size is orders of magnitude larger and the bonds holding people together are super weak, if they exist at all.
It's not that those other styles of communication are bad or wrong—they're great! in contexts where they don't cause people to come to blows—but they're not good here, because the context can't support them. In the current context—the large, anonymous, public internet forum—the cost of keeping the community going is a certain blandness [2] of communication. I'm not fond of that either, but one can't wish these tradeoffs away.
I think we’ve learned, in the last 50 years or so of online discussion, how magnetic flame wars are, and how easy they are to kindle. An assumption of bad faith leads to an accusation which leads to a heated response which leads to people taking sides. Humans love conflict.
Yet it derails topics, it leads to bad feelings, it brings out the worst in us. Better to stop it at the root. The guidelines are simple. Dang tends to ask nicely rather than ban people. Mostly it works.
I don’t see this as hypersensitivity. I mean, there are plenty of places online where you can insult people however you please and it flows like water. I, for one, enjoy a place that tries to be the opposite.
dang has expressed this well before although I can't find the post. Essentially, remember that you can go to any forum on the internet. Here at HN, there is a certain style of discussion and expectation of behavior. By maintaining it here, we actually have more diversity of opinion and expression on the internet as a whole. Parallels to miscegenation, ironically.
dang has admitted he doesn't always get it perfect, and you may not agree with his decisions, but I think we can all understand the principles behind them, and people may not know how fortunate and rare that is.
This is absolute nonsense tone-policing. Y’all allow so many posts here saying straight up racist things, yet you have problems with someone correcting a misrepresentation of facts? Absolutely terrible look
The fallacy here is your assumption that we've seen those other posts. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted to HN—there's far too much.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Oh, I looked him up just fine. I’m not trying to defend the man, or write a full biography. I hoped that providing some background to this awful article would further the discussion. So thank you :)
>>Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes
Keynes was the leading economist of the 20th century. He has some ideas I think are dubious, and his followers have doubled down (I still can't believe people believe in fiscal multipliers greater than 1). Nevertheless, it would be an incredible cheap shot to label Keynes a "eugenicist" when criticizing his economic theories.
Just in case, I think the comment you are responding to doesn't doubt the great utility of Fisher's contributions to statistics, but specifically to the suggestion that Fisher wasn't very much of an eugenicist.
Is it possible to say “were a eugenicist”? Your info is about him decades before the equal rights quote from the GP. It’s possible he changed his mind over the prevailing four decades (I hope)
It's evidence that people can hold opinions that while perhaps mainstream at the time, in retrospect decide they are not well founded, and reconsider them.
I have no idea about Fisher specifically. I hadn't really heard of him until this was posted. Eugenics was popular among a lot of academics in the early 20th century however.
It's possible that he changed his mind but realistically we can only entertain that possibility in the face of some pretty strong evidence given his earlier statements and actions. It's not technically impossible that he grew a horn out of the middle of his forehead either, but much like his views on genetics things we know for sure to be true make it reasonable to assume that this didn't happen unless someone can present a really compelling case that it did.
anyone that tries to model a multi dimensional search space with a sample + univariate function combo should not be considered great no matter the circumstances the issue is not that stats couldn't be objective there just isn't enough data
imo if you told me the NSA was aggregating data about everyone's daily movements, made corrections for wealth, upbringing, network as well as other factors maybe would be a good start
but even then there will be coefficients the rich kids running the clusters will be like "wealth isn't paying for tuition it's flying to europe for vacation" or "having two cars did not contribute in any shape way or form to my learning how to drive I did it because I'm inherently chosen" or "your family beating you anytime you socialized couldn't form socially crippling neural pathways so if you can't network it's because you aren't chosen" so they set the coefficient to that now some poor schmuck who couldn't afford any of those things and had the worst upbringing gets euthanized in the name of science
eugenics to be even remotely ethical would need so much data we just don't have. maybe in a thousand years but who knows how the rich kids will be like then one thing I've learned the world is not for the poor
"Beyond this, people make mistakes. Brilliance represents an upper bound on the quality of your reasoning, but there is no lower bound. The most brilliant scientist in the world can take really dumb stances. Indeed, the success that often goes with brilliance can encourage a blind stubbornness. Not always—some top scientists are admirably skeptical of their own ideas—but sometimes. And if you want to be stubborn, again, there’s no lower bound on how wrong you can be. The best driver in the world can still decide to turn the steering wheel and crash into a tree."
It is one of those profound realizations that seems so obviously true it's irrelevant. But then ask if we evaluate the decisions and statements from smart people this way. Generally the answer is no.
While the brilliant person will have higher quality reasoning on average due to the stretching of the distribution... any individual belief or statement they come up with is being drawn from a distribution that still includes boneheadely wrong.
> While the brilliant person will have higher quality reasoning on average due to the stretching of the distribution... any individual belief or statement they come up with is being drawn from a distribution that still includes boneheadely wrong.
One is reminded of Linus Pauling's flubs on two counts: his obsession with Vitamin C and his denial of quasicrystals.
For some people at that time, smoking was a non-trivial part of their identity. Or even a significant part of what it meant to be a proper Englishman (that and tea). Fisher strikes me as that sort, just look at pictures of him.
The (fairly obvious) lesson here is that people lose their objectivity when it comes to fighting over stuff that involves their identity.
My first thought was that obviously he was a smoker.
I loved cigarettes. I haven't smoked in almost 15 years and I might say I still love cigarettes. There really is no replacement for the feeling of being a smoker, waking up in the morning and drinking coffee with a cigarette as the sun comes up. That is a large part of what makes the addiction so bad.
I say this even with the benefit of knowing how horrible they are for health. It is why I quit eventually.
It is really hard to be objective about your partner when you are in love. A highly abusive partner at that.
I suspect the only thing stronger in humans than love is denial. The combination can be especially deluding.
I can never relate when I hear this perspective. I’m an ex smoker and the idea of having a cigarette first thing in the morning makes me feel sick. There’s zero nostalgia for me. I now find smoking purely revolting.
Fisher’s main scientific and statistical argument boils down to the possibility that gene variants that contribute to lung cancer are tightly linked with gene variants that make nicotine more or less addicting. By “linked with” he meant “close together on the same chromosome”. This kind of linkage can lead to strong a statistical association but without a mechanistic association (guilt by neighborhood).
Disproving this hypothesis is tricky, and Judea Pearl does a brilliant job of explaining the problem and its solution in his marvelous book: The Book of Why.
Fisher gets “assist points” for debilitating and killing millions, although full horrible credit goes to cigarette companies and their advertising co-conspirators.
Judea Pearl points out one cruel irony: The cholinergic receptor gene CHRNA5 that modulates risk of nicotine addiction also modulates lung cancer risk separately. To sort out the causality we now use Mendelian randomization.
Bottom line: smoking cigarettes does kill even when you tidy up the statistics and genetics.
To quote: "Ironically, Fisher was proven right, albeit in a very limited way: such genes [that increase both the tendency to smoke and the tendency for lung cancer] do exist."
The actual issue was not that (Cornfield wrote a paper in 1959 showing the effect was too small). It was that Fisher continued to repeat one finding in one study, despite that said finding had not been replicated in new studies (namely, lung cancer patients described themselves as inhalers less often than the controls), and continued to obstinately ignore all the other research coming out. But it was only 3 years between Cornfield and Fisher's death in 1962, so perhaps Fisher simply did not have time to change his mind.
> It was that Fisher continued to repeat one finding in one study, despite that said finding had not been replicated in new studies (namely, lung cancer patients described themselves as inhalers less often than the controls), and continued to obstinately ignore all the other research coming out.
Even if that finding were true, it could just mean that the cancer patients had stopped inhaling due to lung problems and underestimated how much they used to inhale.
If you asked me to estimate my caffeine, alcohol, fat, or sugar estimate from even 10 or 15 years ago, or how many steps per day I walked, I’m not confident I could give an accurate answer at all. If you asked me details about how I ate and drank — how fast I ate, how often I ate out, how quickly I replenished empty drinks, what percentage of the time I drank water with alcohol, or how often I cleaned my plate — I’m sure I’d be completely off the mark.
Why would you expect anything else? Becoming "a top scientist" doesn't turn you into some non-human intelligent entity without flaws for the rest of your life, it just means you've done some notable scientific work in some areas. And that work doesn't even have to be correct! You could've been a top scientist with later top (or even low) scientists invalidating all your top science work
I agree with you but I think society has a certain bias that way — a saint or genius bias or myth. It extends into science and engineering itself, although I don't think it's limited to that domain either.
What's interesting to me is how some can recognize this in the past but not the present, or think it only applies in certain domains.
As far as I can tell the only reference to something that Fisher said was a clip from a newspaper article where he said that criticizing smoking was terrorism. The rest appears to just be other contemporary evidence that the cigarette execs knew it was bad but some scientists (not Fisher?) didn't believe that it was bad.
Am I missing something -- does this article spell out to what extent Fisher himself defended smoking?
Here is Fisher, in a letter to the editors of _Nature_ (perhaps the most prestigious journal imaginable) "Cancer and Smoking"[1]:
> If, for example, it were possible to infer that smoking cigarettes is a cause of this disease, it would equally be possible to infer on exactly similar grounds that inhaling cigarette smoke was a practice of considerable prophylactic value in preventing the disease, for the practice of inhaling is rarer among patients with cancer of the lung than with others.
[...]
There is nothing to stop those who greatly desire it from believing that lung cancer is caused by smoking cigarettes. They should also believe that inhaling cigarette smoke is a protection. To believe either is, however, to run the risk of failing to recognize, and therefore failing to prevent, other and more genuine causes.
As a geneticist, he of course took the position that it was a
smoking gene confounding the causation.
One aspect that modern finance has laid clear is the concept of monetization of various assets one possesses. In the past, it wasn't clear that one's brand was monetizable or how one could do that. Individuals would happen upon these now and then, even if it wasn't systematized. The most obvious answer is that R. A. Fisher happened upon a way to monetize his brand in a way that aligned with his politics: he was a good statistician, and therefore people believed him, but the value of "being a good statistician and known to be so" is much higher than just being a good statistician and this was one such thing where he could extract more value. The part about aligned politics is that it helps when you're trading reputation.
Today, most of this is well understood. MIT sells its brand under MIT Media Lab, something you can easily understand if you read the theses published by this division of the university. Other universities sell their brand under things like 30 day courses that grant a certificate named similarly to their graduate degrees. In some sense, they are internalizing the surplus generated by the brand. Interesting model.
I think Ancel Keys is in this category, and we are still suffering and dying from his opinions, which are a leading reason for the upside down food pyramid. I don't doubt his sincerity or intelligence at all. He's just an instance of how badly top scientists can get it wrong with the best of intentions, and how enormously expensive such failures can be.
You see this time and time again. A scientist/mathematician/technological leader who thinks because they are the "cat's pajamas" in one field that they are equipped to chime in on another. One example is John Clauser, Nobel winning physicist, making a downright embarrassing attempt to "debunk climate change." (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kGiCUiOMyQ) Another is Elon Musk, who seems to have an opinion on everything. Sometimes there is money or malice involved -often just hubris.
This was my brother's theory on why Steve Jobs didn't use traditional cancer treatments. The way he explained it to me was "Put yourself in his place: your whole life every time everyone said you were wrong about something and it was gonna destroy you you did it anyway and made a billion dollars. This time they were right and he was wrong but you can't blame him for playing the odds one last time."
It's hardly limited to Nobel laureates. But it's certainly a strong marker that somebody had indeed tremendous scientific skills, and then failed utterly to apply that ability later.
I'm kinda not a fan of the list there, since it tries to tar a few early-20th century folks with connections with ESP and parapsychology, but my understanding is those ideas weren't as kooky back then as they are now.
There's a podcast named "??? Tapes" (can't remember the ??? part) on the matter that seems to be blowing a lot of people's minds, some of whom were formerly very skeptical.
Elon is only an authority in the topic of raising money and mostly not trashing the work of the better men whose work he buys when he correctly infers he doesn't know enough.
You see this wherein he has mostly avoids ruining spacex because he knows he isn't a rocket scientist but absolutely wrecks Twitter because he thinks he understands it.
See also his delusions about mars, desire to use a minisub in a cave rescue so tight divers had to remove tanks, stopping services needed for 2FA, and suggestion for relay satelites between earth and mars to communucate faster.
He's absolutely intellectually average with a way above average personality, ego, and wallet.
> You see this time and time again. A scientist/mathematician/technological leader who thinks because they are the "cat's pajamas" in one field that they are equipped to chime in on another.
You don't think one of the world's foremost statisticians should have felt that he was qualified to participate in a purely statistical argument?
Are we getting stuck on terminology whereby you don't think the long term effect of a chemical on a body insofar as its connection with a known disease is a medical matter?
Medicine is literally chemistry and biology as applied to human health. I'm not stuck on anything you in this subthread appear to be. It's pretty obvious that someone without deep domain knowledge is should scarcely be trusted to tie their own shoe let alone contradict actual experts.
This idea for me comes from a friend that does patent law. He said the hard thing about a patent is knowing what questions need to be answered. Not the answers. It's all about framing the problem, all the hard hard is really there.
We reward and give status to scientists that come up with answers and the people doing the hard framing work not so much. The two guys that used standard crystallography techniques to figure out DNA is a double helix got the Nobel prize. The lady that figured out how to crystalize DNA and get the films is completely ignored.
So yeah top scientists high on their own ego will totally biff it when dealing with some other field they know nothing about.
Rosalind Franklin didn't figure out how to crystalize the DNA, they were doing fiber diffraction. Similarly, the films were collected by her student Raymond Gosling. She shared her work at a department seminar and published it internally (Crick didn't "steal" it). And she was also published in the same exact journal of Nature.
The reason W&C won the prize is that not only did the propose the (close to correct) structure, they realized it was a antiparalleldouble helix, and deduced the underlying mechanism for genetic replication: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." and also made a few key observations about isomerization in bases that allows for G/C and A/T pairing to be specific.
Crick was a genius, although he also went off-piste with panspermia, and Watson is just an asshole. Franklin was a great scientist but it's not clear at all that she should have or would have received the prize.
I have a friend who really got into studying people who buy into conspiracy theories.
His conclusion mostly is that cleverness does not shield you from believing falsehoods. These are 2 distincts properties of the mind. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Smart people are very good at finding causes that justify what they believe in.
The point is that there is a ton of things that we know that are in fact based on beliefs. Like: did I ever see an atom with my own eyes? Nope. Did I see a clock slow down because it flew in a rocket really fast? Nope. Did I ever check that the moon landing looked legit? Nope.
One of my favorites is the controversy about Q-tips, there are tons of people who say it's bad for your ears, and then there's a guy who did a study that concluded that no study ever proved that Q-tips were bad for your ears. I know Q-tips are probably bad for my ears, but they feel so good, so whenever my wife brings up that I should stop using them, I always refer her to that one guy who tried to prove that Q-tips weren't that bad.
Perhaps it's just user error, but if you compact the wax in your ear by shoving stuff into it then you'll be in for a world of pain when the doctor uses a watergun to uncompact it.
Don't know, I've been doing it for 20+ years. My ears seem fine.
I did have to unwax them a while back like 12 years ago, it's not unpleasant, you put a liquid in your ear, and it reacts with the wax and it starts to bubble in a tingly way. It feels all weird. And then you squirt some warm water to remove everything.
I think it's fascinating that lack of information can generate both belief and disbelief in equal amounts.
For example, it took a while for germ theory to gain acceptance. People cannot see germs, so it's hard to believe in then. But people also fervently believe in ghosts and bad luck, neither of which can be seen.
Both are ultimately "caused" by a lack of information. When the lack itself is enticing because it creates mystery, it invites fantastic theories and superstition, but if it's not, it generates doubt and resistance.
Conspiracy theories resonate because you can always form a picture that explains the mystery in an enticing way in the same primitive way that weather must be created by the gods and ghosts are responsible for strange sounds in the attic.
This kind of dichotomy between credulity and incredulity is seen everywhere where humans need to deal with the absence of clear information. What I find fascinating is that while science has given us tons of powerful tools to reveal the unseen, we are still so powerfully drawn to the opposite side.
This comes off as borderline hagiography, when the answer is pretty clear. People figured out that chronic smoking was bad for you a LONG time ago, the reason that understanding was undermined rebutted had nothing to do with science, and everything to do with money.
Can you provide evidence of this strong claim? It looks like you’re conflating his population genetics work with eugenics/race science (which in turn have significant differences that I won’t go into).
It's kind of the same situation with alcohol now: a lot of people denouncing it, the alcohol industry throwing a lot of shade, and top scientists making confident pronouncements (on both sides).
> for whatever reason, cigarettes were a conservative cause
For.. the.. money?
Money is a very conservative cause. Anything that gets in the way of money is "terrorist" and "commonism" (sic).
It should be noted, tobacco was the cash crop that finally made England's American adventure profitsble. Without it, we euro-americans might be speaking french or Spanish across all of north america now...
Does it even need to be that analytical? Conservatism can also also be general skepticism of change. And I don't know if you've ever tried to quit nicotine before but it's very good at convincing you it's a relatively harmless habit that helps cope with all sorts of stress and anxiety. If you're already inclined to be generally skeptical of change, smoking would slot right in there.
That said I'm curious if we're projecting back strong moralistic or party/ideology-aligned takes on smoking before it was really prevalent. I don't think anyone is questioning the role money plays in broadly misleading the public about smoking itself, just that the ideological/partisan divide such as it exists today might not map cleanly to the past.
See also James Watson, Nobel winner for discovering DNA, who continues to make racist remarks despite scientific evidence that he's incorrect. This has unsurprisingly led to the complete destruction of his reputation and considerable loss of income. People don't need financial incentives to be wrong, apparently.
> But then this just pushes the question back one step: How could this brilliant statistician be so naive?
I would suggest that if they're taking money to spout bad science, they're not actually brilliant. So I would suggest this pushes the question back yet further, why do we (still?) think he was brilliant?
You can be brilliant and greedy. The point at which you're making statements based on your greed rather than your brilliance, that's the line we stop saying they're brilliant.
I do not subscribe to the "great men" theory of history. Independent rediscovery has happened over and over again. If not him, someone else would have come about with the same discoveries.
It's fine to question that "great men" are the prime movers of history. But you're taking it too far by saying something like "all discoveries would have been made by someone else so individuals get no credit". First, that's obviously not true -- we can't know that every bit of knowledge would have been discovered by someone else. Second, it's beside the point -- the discoveries weren't made by someone else.
"Great men" vs. "impersonal historical process" is one of those dichotomies that will never be resolved. If you find yourself at either extreme, you're making an obvious error. Find a comfortable place somewhere in the middle.
So invention itself is not laudable because it’s inevitable? That’s an odd attitude. Newton’s laws of motion would have been discovered by someone, somewhere, so there’s no point in remembering and praising Newton for his work? It’s nihilistic.
I’m honestly baffled by how swiftly everyone demonizes cigarettes as the ultimate evil, as if that’s a done deal.
Whenever group-think is this loud, it’s a huge red flag we should crack open the raw data ourselves. Fisher wasn’t some mustache-twirling villain, just a stubborn contrarian pushing against the orthodoxy. And if Big Tobacco slipped him a check, that doesn’t automatically nuke his math.
Correlation hype is easy, real causation proof is hard, and I’d love to see all the data and methodology. We don’t push science forward by chanting from the same hymn book. We do it by asking hard, unpopular questions.
> just a stubborn contrarian pushing against the orthodoxy.
It's not enough to be a contrarian, you also have to be right. Acknowledging that cigarettes are bad isn't "group think", it's an easy consensus because the evidence at every level, scientific, personal is very clear. Just walk up a bunch of stairs with a heavy smoker.
People who constantly act contrarian because they cannot accept that orthodox opinions are, most of the time, established opinion for decent reasons are both annoying and especially these days a blight on public discourse. They don't move science forward (forward progress is by definition only possible if matters are, at some point, actually settled instead of repeated for eternity), they try to get attention by standing out.
And of course companies tend to use these people because they can easily become useful idiots, it's no surprise that there's an entire cottage industry of "heterodox thinkers" these days. The book in the article, Merchants of Doubt, gives some great examples on this in regards to pollution and climate change denial.
I'll bite. The science, as far as I understand it, clearly demonstrates the addictive properties of nicotine and the negative health effects of smoking.
The alternative theory I've heard is that there are secondary benefits to moderate consumption of cigarettes (moderate in this case being three to five per day) due to appetite suppression and creation of a 3rd place accessible during working hours. Some would also suggest that, at least in institutional environments (hospitals, universities, corporate campuses and manufacturing facilities), the food court/cafeteria and the accompanying array of fast food have replaced the cigarette break.
In this view, we haven't really solved any problems. We've just shifted the damage into a form that society finds to be more palatable. What if we could bring back the cigarette break and in the process boost people's community engagement, mental health and significantly reduce the obesity epidemic all in one hrrrm...
TL:DR; The way that most tobacco is produced causes it to contain Polonium-210. Can we at least agree that putting Polonium-210 into the human body is not great?
Have we done a RCT on polonium ingestion? All I'm asking for is a consistent epistemological threshold. Justifying belief based on what amounts to a scientific "vibe" isn't rational knowledge independent of its veracity.
Click the first link from 1964, look up the dosage in rems. Then look up the lethality of that amount of radiation, noting that the effects of radiation are largely cumulative.
If you want to find something actually interesting in all of this, read this piece about this industry reaction.
I've conversed on this before. Inconsistent justifications for beliefs undermines science.
It's no different than insisting that belief in a drug's efficacy rests on RCTs. I'm legitimately unfamiliar with polonium ingestion trials so I don't have a justification for believing that it is harmful.
I want to be very clear that I'm not arguing that polonium isn't harmful - I believe it is. I just don't have justification for that belief. I believe that it's important to understand the difference between true beliefs and justified true beliefs.
Do I accept as fact that polonium is radioactive? Yes. Do I accept as fact that radioactive elements are poisonous to humans when absorbed? Yes. Do I accept as fact that Polonium from inhaled smoke particles will be absorbed? Yes.
The logical positivism part. It brings with it a host of assumptions. Of course, you're free to believe in them, but I don't think logical positivism is justifiable. That's generally why science today is built on falsifiability rather than verifiability.
I understand this thread started with you objecting to the assumption that polonium is harmful to humans. Going so far as to suggest that anything short of an RCT is not enough.
Yet even if I read RCT results concluding polonium to be harmless, I would distrust that conclusion, not my understanding.
Somehow we're doing this epistemology thing differently. It feels to me like you live in a world of impossibly high standards. Or you just like to argue hypotheticals.
This isn’t a random crank we’re talking about. Robert Fisher is widely acknowledge as one of the foremost scientists in the last 100 years. His contributions to statistics alone would earn him that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher
He was wrong about smoking, but the more you read about him the less you’ll believe it had much to do with money. He was used to being right about so many things, and in this area he was blind.
The article also throws shade at him as a “eugenicist.” I looked it up, and again, the truth is more complex. He wrote this in the 50s:
“I am sorry that there should be propaganda in favour of miscegenation in North America as I am sure it can do nothing but harm. Is it beyond human endeavour to give and justly administer equal rights to all citizens without fooling ourselves that these are equivalent items?”
So first — even using the word “miscegenation” puts you in a bad camp, and there’s no defending his attitude against interracial marriage. OTOH he seemed honestly to believe in the “equal rights” part, too. Too much of the old British “white man’s burden” bullshit, I believe.
Modern connotations of the word "miscegenation aside" aside (the word's denotation means "mixing of races", which is exactly the correct terminology for the issue), and laying aside modern understanding of "race" vs "ethnicity", in Fisher's era racial separatism was considered a solution to racism, not only by White people but also by many leading Black rights activists, such as Malcom X and Muhammad Ali in the Nation of Islam. Ethnonationalism may well be a bad idea in theory or or practice, but it's not purely an oppressor's idea. (It's not obvious that there is any unalloyed good solution to racism and human nature.)
https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/mxp/speeches/mxt14....
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/06/10/481414008...
It was common enough at the time to hold the opinion that "mixing of the races" resulted in offspring that were worse than either race.
Frequently expressed across the colonial Commonwealth, Canada to Australia, South Africa and elsewhere.
eg Daisy Bates (sometime wife of Breaker Morant) wrote in the state newspaper in regard of Australian Aborigines:
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Bates_(author)Miscegenation Laws regarding mixing of races remained in force in Bates part of the world until the 1960s, as did others enforcing the separation of mixed children from their families.
It seems less "a solution to racism" and more an excuse to enforce racist ideas aand attitudes.
sometimes I read stuff like this and feel so sad I was born in the 21st century and not in the 31st
Pizza delivery hasn't led me to time machines yet :(
Only because you don't know what strange new kinds of racism people will have managed to invent in the 31st century.
Future racism is explored in The Expanse. Humans have colonized the solar system, humans on Earth are on the brink of war with the humans on Mars, and they have slurs for each other.
well the hope is I go enough into the future where being poor doesn't exist or at least I can exist
unlike David Ricardo my wants are not infinite lol
It's such a strange opinion because hybrid vigor[1] is so well known in nature.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
Robert De Niro's child is perhaps the best example of the astounding beauty of mixed raced children. That child is the most beautiful of the lot.
> in Fisher's era racial separatism was considered a solution to racism
Not just a solution to racism, but also a defense against genocide. Forced interracial "marriages", rape, etc were used as a genocidal tool against the natives along with murder. Natives who refused to mix with whites were derogatorily called racists by the white settlers.
Miscegenation was actually supported by natives, blacks, asians, etc in order preserve their cultures/races in a white dominated nation. Racism ( by all sides ) actually preserved diversity in the US for centuries. Otherwise, everyone would be white due to demographic realities of the nation.
>The article also throws shade at him as a “eugenicist.” I looked it up, and again, the truth is more complex.
You didn't look it up very well.
>In 1911, Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes, R. C. Punnett, and Horace Darwin. After members of the Cambridge Society – including Fisher – stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912, a link was forged with the Eugenics Society (UK).[122] He saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues that encompassed and drove his interest in both genetics and statistics. During World War I Fisher started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal, being hired for a part-time position.
I think that if you:
1. are the founding chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society,
2. stewarded the First International Eugenics Congress in London in summer 1912,
3. saw eugenics as addressing pressing social and scientific issues, and
4. started writing book reviews for The Eugenics Review and volunteered to undertake all such reviews for the journal
..you are a eugenicist.
My research consisted of clicking on, and reading, the link you yourself posted.
Can you please make your substantive points without crossing into the flamewar style? When someone else is mistaken, it's enough to respectfully explain how they are mistaken.
Tossing in swipes like "You didn't look it up very well", or snark twisters like "My research consisted of clicking on, and reading, the link you yourself posted", is bad for many reasons, including that (1) it degrades the forum; (2) it evokes worse from others; and (3) it discredits your viewpoint, which is particularly bad if it happens to be true.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How else should the parent had framed his comment ? Can you give an example of the correct wording ?
I’m genuinely confused because his comment was valuable to me.
OP had either made an error or was attempting to mislead the audience by downplaying critical facts in his argument and patent highlighted it, which I appreciate because no one has the time to digest all the references.
Cherry picking or skippping over critical context is unhelpful at best or deceptive st worst.
If the comment hadn't started with "You didn't look it up very well" or ended with "My research consisted of clicking on, and reading, the link you yourself posted", both of which were needless swipes, I wouldn't have posted a moderation reply. Does that answer your question?
"I believe this is not the case because: XXX" would be a neutral response. And one that most people would give to most other strangers if they are meeting in real life. But on the internet it happens very often that people aren't actually as respectful as they would be in real life. And it happens very naturally too - I have close friends who have had insane arguments over chat apps which they would never have done in an eye to eye situation.
In general responding with a statement that assigns a quality to someone's work and effort is not appropriate. You can say "That information is not correct" if you want to be assertive but saying "You have not researched or read the correct information" is doing more then correcting information and becomes personal.
I've seen a lot of people, myself included have trouble with this distinction. But I have found it to be an important part of being "considerate" of others and being charismatic to them. People really react differently to the smallest of nuance in tone and wording regardless if they are adults. (I'd actually wager adults react much more strongly to that nuance due to having more experience to tell the nuances apart)
One can singlehandedly provide valuable information and degrade the quality of the conversation. Best to not, of course.
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Genuine question. Is it better or worse for a site like HN to have guidelines in place which leads to hypersenstivity when it comes to comments? Aren't we all adults here on this site who should be able to handle some pushback?
My take is that it takes only a small percentage of people to be toxic, for the lack of a better term, for most of the conversation to be toxic. E.g. someone acts inappropriately, then a few people overreact (i.e. follow suit), then whoever isn't interested in thinking in baser terms altogether skips the conversation: ergo, the conversation is dominated by the outraged, divisive minority.
Have you read any thread here on IQ, or immigration, or outsourcing? You can find the most vile, bottom-of-the-barrel opinions there, and the mods don’t give a shit, yet here you have a comment calling out misrepresentation (at best) of facts about eugenics and suddenly dang feels the need to sweep in and tone-police that?
I don't think I have. In those other cases, do you think that dang is being biased towards certain causes, or that he failed to moderate for some more benign reason?
> Aren't we all adults here on this site who should be able to handle some pushback?
Sadly not. I'm tempted to say "most adults aren't adults", but the actual dynamics are more what dmos62 described.
Let's say most of us are adults most of the time, but that gap between "most" and "all" is, given a large-enough population, more than enough to ruin every thread if care isn't taken to avoid this.
Edit: one factor that often goes unappreciated is the size of the community. Small, cohesive communities can support more robust (or even aggressive) styles of interaction—especially when people have other things in common that unite them. In the past I've often compared this to rugby teams [1] that beat the crap out of each other and then go to the pub together; or literary or comedy communities where the art of insulting each other is part of the fun. These dynamics break down completely in a context like HN, where the group size is orders of magnitude larger and the bonds holding people together are super weak, if they exist at all.
It's not that those other styles of communication are bad or wrong—they're great! in contexts where they don't cause people to come to blows—but they're not good here, because the context can't support them. In the current context—the large, anonymous, public internet forum—the cost of keeping the community going is a certain blandness [2] of communication. I'm not fond of that either, but one can't wish these tradeoffs away.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I think we’ve learned, in the last 50 years or so of online discussion, how magnetic flame wars are, and how easy they are to kindle. An assumption of bad faith leads to an accusation which leads to a heated response which leads to people taking sides. Humans love conflict.
Yet it derails topics, it leads to bad feelings, it brings out the worst in us. Better to stop it at the root. The guidelines are simple. Dang tends to ask nicely rather than ban people. Mostly it works.
I don’t see this as hypersensitivity. I mean, there are plenty of places online where you can insult people however you please and it flows like water. I, for one, enjoy a place that tries to be the opposite.
dang has expressed this well before although I can't find the post. Essentially, remember that you can go to any forum on the internet. Here at HN, there is a certain style of discussion and expectation of behavior. By maintaining it here, we actually have more diversity of opinion and expression on the internet as a whole. Parallels to miscegenation, ironically.
dang has admitted he doesn't always get it perfect, and you may not agree with his decisions, but I think we can all understand the principles behind them, and people may not know how fortunate and rare that is.
A good question.
The whole domain of interpersonal relations at scale is vastly understudied.
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Wouldn't you profit from believing that the other party acts in good faith?
There are no apologists in this thread, snakeyjake. You’re making bad-faith assumptions and trying to start shit. This isn’t the place for that.
Aggressive first mover abuse of the truth is fine, but in defense one must be polite.
This is absolute nonsense tone-policing. Y’all allow so many posts here saying straight up racist things, yet you have problems with someone correcting a misrepresentation of facts? Absolutely terrible look
The fallacy here is your assumption that we've seen those other posts. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted to HN—there's far too much.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Oh, I looked him up just fine. I’m not trying to defend the man, or write a full biography. I hoped that providing some background to this awful article would further the discussion. So thank you :)
>>Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes
Keynes was the leading economist of the 20th century. He has some ideas I think are dubious, and his followers have doubled down (I still can't believe people believe in fiscal multipliers greater than 1). Nevertheless, it would be an incredible cheap shot to label Keynes a "eugenicist" when criticizing his economic theories.
Just in case, I think the comment you are responding to doesn't doubt the great utility of Fisher's contributions to statistics, but specifically to the suggestion that Fisher wasn't very much of an eugenicist.
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>you are a eugenicist.
Is it possible to say “were a eugenicist”? Your info is about him decades before the equal rights quote from the GP. It’s possible he changed his mind over the prevailing four decades (I hope)
> It’s possible he changed his mind over the prevailing four decades (I hope)
There's far less justification for inventing a conversion out of whole cloth.
Obama and Clinton changed their minds on gay marriage.
Do believe that's evidence that Fisher changed his mind on eugenics? Why do you bring that up?
It's evidence that people can hold opinions that while perhaps mainstream at the time, in retrospect decide they are not well founded, and reconsider them.
I have no idea about Fisher specifically. I hadn't really heard of him until this was posted. Eugenics was popular among a lot of academics in the early 20th century however.
Could be. Maybe it happened!
The question here is about whether there is any shred of evidence that it did happen.
Or maybe ur weakass comment degrades the forum, dang
Again, if you can provide some kind of comprehensible reasoning why that's actually the case, your insightful comment would be more persuasive.
It's possible that he changed his mind but realistically we can only entertain that possibility in the face of some pretty strong evidence given his earlier statements and actions. It's not technically impossible that he grew a horn out of the middle of his forehead either, but much like his views on genetics things we know for sure to be true make it reasonable to assume that this didn't happen unless someone can present a really compelling case that it did.
Why the hostility? We are discussing the history of science in the early 20th century, not a property dispute about your house.
not Keynes :( used to be a fan what is it with rich kids always coming up with the most dysfunctional philosphies Keynes, Malthus, Leibniz, Darwin
would be cool to read alternative history fiction where poor people came up with belief systems
More clarity on the slippery slope from eugenics to genocide, despite the existence of a theoretical morally-defensible version of non-genocidal, consensual eugenics: https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014/
anyone that tries to model a multi dimensional search space with a sample + univariate function combo should not be considered great no matter the circumstances the issue is not that stats couldn't be objective there just isn't enough data
imo if you told me the NSA was aggregating data about everyone's daily movements, made corrections for wealth, upbringing, network as well as other factors maybe would be a good start
but even then there will be coefficients the rich kids running the clusters will be like "wealth isn't paying for tuition it's flying to europe for vacation" or "having two cars did not contribute in any shape way or form to my learning how to drive I did it because I'm inherently chosen" or "your family beating you anytime you socialized couldn't form socially crippling neural pathways so if you can't network it's because you aren't chosen" so they set the coefficient to that now some poor schmuck who couldn't afford any of those things and had the worst upbringing gets euthanized in the name of science
eugenics to be even remotely ethical would need so much data we just don't have. maybe in a thousand years but who knows how the rich kids will be like then one thing I've learned the world is not for the poor
This is my favorite passage from the article:
"Beyond this, people make mistakes. Brilliance represents an upper bound on the quality of your reasoning, but there is no lower bound. The most brilliant scientist in the world can take really dumb stances. Indeed, the success that often goes with brilliance can encourage a blind stubbornness. Not always—some top scientists are admirably skeptical of their own ideas—but sometimes. And if you want to be stubborn, again, there’s no lower bound on how wrong you can be. The best driver in the world can still decide to turn the steering wheel and crash into a tree."
It is one of those profound realizations that seems so obviously true it's irrelevant. But then ask if we evaluate the decisions and statements from smart people this way. Generally the answer is no.
While the brilliant person will have higher quality reasoning on average due to the stretching of the distribution... any individual belief or statement they come up with is being drawn from a distribution that still includes boneheadely wrong.
> While the brilliant person will have higher quality reasoning on average due to the stretching of the distribution... any individual belief or statement they come up with is being drawn from a distribution that still includes boneheadely wrong.
One is reminded of Linus Pauling's flubs on two counts: his obsession with Vitamin C and his denial of quasicrystals.
For some people at that time, smoking was a non-trivial part of their identity. Or even a significant part of what it meant to be a proper Englishman (that and tea). Fisher strikes me as that sort, just look at pictures of him.
The (fairly obvious) lesson here is that people lose their objectivity when it comes to fighting over stuff that involves their identity.
My first thought was that obviously he was a smoker.
I loved cigarettes. I haven't smoked in almost 15 years and I might say I still love cigarettes. There really is no replacement for the feeling of being a smoker, waking up in the morning and drinking coffee with a cigarette as the sun comes up. That is a large part of what makes the addiction so bad.
I say this even with the benefit of knowing how horrible they are for health. It is why I quit eventually.
It is really hard to be objective about your partner when you are in love. A highly abusive partner at that.
I suspect the only thing stronger in humans than love is denial. The combination can be especially deluding.
I can never relate when I hear this perspective. I’m an ex smoker and the idea of having a cigarette first thing in the morning makes me feel sick. There’s zero nostalgia for me. I now find smoking purely revolting.
Fisher’s main scientific and statistical argument boils down to the possibility that gene variants that contribute to lung cancer are tightly linked with gene variants that make nicotine more or less addicting. By “linked with” he meant “close together on the same chromosome”. This kind of linkage can lead to strong a statistical association but without a mechanistic association (guilt by neighborhood).
Disproving this hypothesis is tricky, and Judea Pearl does a brilliant job of explaining the problem and its solution in his marvelous book: The Book of Why.
Fisher gets “assist points” for debilitating and killing millions, although full horrible credit goes to cigarette companies and their advertising co-conspirators.
Judea Pearl points out one cruel irony: The cholinergic receptor gene CHRNA5 that modulates risk of nicotine addiction also modulates lung cancer risk separately. To sort out the causality we now use Mendelian randomization.
Bottom line: smoking cigarettes does kill even when you tidy up the statistics and genetics.
To quote: "Ironically, Fisher was proven right, albeit in a very limited way: such genes [that increase both the tendency to smoke and the tendency for lung cancer] do exist."
The actual issue was not that (Cornfield wrote a paper in 1959 showing the effect was too small). It was that Fisher continued to repeat one finding in one study, despite that said finding had not been replicated in new studies (namely, lung cancer patients described themselves as inhalers less often than the controls), and continued to obstinately ignore all the other research coming out. But it was only 3 years between Cornfield and Fisher's death in 1962, so perhaps Fisher simply did not have time to change his mind.
> It was that Fisher continued to repeat one finding in one study, despite that said finding had not been replicated in new studies (namely, lung cancer patients described themselves as inhalers less often than the controls), and continued to obstinately ignore all the other research coming out.
Even if that finding were true, it could just mean that the cancer patients had stopped inhaling due to lung problems and underestimated how much they used to inhale.
If you asked me to estimate my caffeine, alcohol, fat, or sugar estimate from even 10 or 15 years ago, or how many steps per day I walked, I’m not confident I could give an accurate answer at all. If you asked me details about how I ate and drank — how fast I ate, how often I ate out, how quickly I replenished empty drinks, what percentage of the time I drank water with alcohol, or how often I cleaned my plate — I’m sure I’d be completely off the mark.
Why would you expect anything else? Becoming "a top scientist" doesn't turn you into some non-human intelligent entity without flaws for the rest of your life, it just means you've done some notable scientific work in some areas. And that work doesn't even have to be correct! You could've been a top scientist with later top (or even low) scientists invalidating all your top science work
I agree with you but I think society has a certain bias that way — a saint or genius bias or myth. It extends into science and engineering itself, although I don't think it's limited to that domain either.
What's interesting to me is how some can recognize this in the past but not the present, or think it only applies in certain domains.
As far as I can tell the only reference to something that Fisher said was a clip from a newspaper article where he said that criticizing smoking was terrorism. The rest appears to just be other contemporary evidence that the cigarette execs knew it was bad but some scientists (not Fisher?) didn't believe that it was bad.
Am I missing something -- does this article spell out to what extent Fisher himself defended smoking?
Here is Fisher, in a letter to the editors of _Nature_ (perhaps the most prestigious journal imaginable) "Cancer and Smoking"[1]:
> If, for example, it were possible to infer that smoking cigarettes is a cause of this disease, it would equally be possible to infer on exactly similar grounds that inhaling cigarette smoke was a practice of considerable prophylactic value in preventing the disease, for the practice of inhaling is rarer among patients with cancer of the lung than with others. [...] There is nothing to stop those who greatly desire it from believing that lung cancer is caused by smoking cigarettes. They should also believe that inhaling cigarette smoke is a protection. To believe either is, however, to run the risk of failing to recognize, and therefore failing to prevent, other and more genuine causes.
As a geneticist, he of course took the position that it was a smoking gene confounding the causation.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/182596a0
One aspect that modern finance has laid clear is the concept of monetization of various assets one possesses. In the past, it wasn't clear that one's brand was monetizable or how one could do that. Individuals would happen upon these now and then, even if it wasn't systematized. The most obvious answer is that R. A. Fisher happened upon a way to monetize his brand in a way that aligned with his politics: he was a good statistician, and therefore people believed him, but the value of "being a good statistician and known to be so" is much higher than just being a good statistician and this was one such thing where he could extract more value. The part about aligned politics is that it helps when you're trading reputation.
Today, most of this is well understood. MIT sells its brand under MIT Media Lab, something you can easily understand if you read the theses published by this division of the university. Other universities sell their brand under things like 30 day courses that grant a certificate named similarly to their graduate degrees. In some sense, they are internalizing the surplus generated by the brand. Interesting model.
See quotes in my profile.
If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done. - Peter Ustinov
Sounds like Ted Turner needed to change the end of the world video on CNN.
I think Ancel Keys is in this category, and we are still suffering and dying from his opinions, which are a leading reason for the upside down food pyramid. I don't doubt his sincerity or intelligence at all. He's just an instance of how badly top scientists can get it wrong with the best of intentions, and how enormously expensive such failures can be.
You see this time and time again. A scientist/mathematician/technological leader who thinks because they are the "cat's pajamas" in one field that they are equipped to chime in on another. One example is John Clauser, Nobel winning physicist, making a downright embarrassing attempt to "debunk climate change." (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kGiCUiOMyQ) Another is Elon Musk, who seems to have an opinion on everything. Sometimes there is money or malice involved -often just hubris.
This was my brother's theory on why Steve Jobs didn't use traditional cancer treatments. The way he explained it to me was "Put yourself in his place: your whole life every time everyone said you were wrong about something and it was gonna destroy you you did it anyway and made a billion dollars. This time they were right and he was wrong but you can't blame him for playing the odds one last time."
Nobelists are so prone to it that Wikipedia has a page dedicated to it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
It's hardly limited to Nobel laureates. But it's certainly a strong marker that somebody had indeed tremendous scientific skills, and then failed utterly to apply that ability later.
> It's hardly limited to Nobel laureates.
See also: Engineer's disease.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
I'm kinda not a fan of the list there, since it tries to tar a few early-20th century folks with connections with ESP and parapsychology, but my understanding is those ideas weren't as kooky back then as they are now.
There's a podcast named "??? Tapes" (can't remember the ??? part) on the matter that seems to be blowing a lot of people's minds, some of whom were formerly very skeptical.
Elon is only an authority in the topic of raising money and mostly not trashing the work of the better men whose work he buys when he correctly infers he doesn't know enough.
You see this wherein he has mostly avoids ruining spacex because he knows he isn't a rocket scientist but absolutely wrecks Twitter because he thinks he understands it.
See also his delusions about mars, desire to use a minisub in a cave rescue so tight divers had to remove tanks, stopping services needed for 2FA, and suggestion for relay satelites between earth and mars to communucate faster.
He's absolutely intellectually average with a way above average personality, ego, and wallet.
> You see this time and time again. A scientist/mathematician/technological leader who thinks because they are the "cat's pajamas" in one field that they are equipped to chime in on another.
You don't think one of the world's foremost statisticians should have felt that he was qualified to participate in a purely statistical argument?
No because it was medical as well. Anyone who thought it was purely statistical was by that thought alone unqualified
What's the medical part of the argument?
Are we getting stuck on terminology whereby you don't think the long term effect of a chemical on a body insofar as its connection with a known disease is a medical matter?
Medicine is literally chemistry and biology as applied to human health. I'm not stuck on anything you in this subthread appear to be. It's pretty obvious that someone without deep domain knowledge is should scarcely be trusted to tie their own shoe let alone contradict actual experts.
This idea for me comes from a friend that does patent law. He said the hard thing about a patent is knowing what questions need to be answered. Not the answers. It's all about framing the problem, all the hard hard is really there.
We reward and give status to scientists that come up with answers and the people doing the hard framing work not so much. The two guys that used standard crystallography techniques to figure out DNA is a double helix got the Nobel prize. The lady that figured out how to crystalize DNA and get the films is completely ignored.
So yeah top scientists high on their own ego will totally biff it when dealing with some other field they know nothing about.
Rosalind Franklin didn't figure out how to crystalize the DNA, they were doing fiber diffraction. Similarly, the films were collected by her student Raymond Gosling. She shared her work at a department seminar and published it internally (Crick didn't "steal" it). And she was also published in the same exact journal of Nature.
The reason W&C won the prize is that not only did the propose the (close to correct) structure, they realized it was a antiparallel double helix, and deduced the underlying mechanism for genetic replication: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." and also made a few key observations about isomerization in bases that allows for G/C and A/T pairing to be specific.
Crick was a genius, although he also went off-piste with panspermia, and Watson is just an asshole. Franklin was a great scientist but it's not clear at all that she should have or would have received the prize.
I have a friend who really got into studying people who buy into conspiracy theories.
His conclusion mostly is that cleverness does not shield you from believing falsehoods. These are 2 distincts properties of the mind. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Smart people are very good at finding causes that justify what they believe in.
The point is that there is a ton of things that we know that are in fact based on beliefs. Like: did I ever see an atom with my own eyes? Nope. Did I see a clock slow down because it flew in a rocket really fast? Nope. Did I ever check that the moon landing looked legit? Nope.
One of my favorites is the controversy about Q-tips, there are tons of people who say it's bad for your ears, and then there's a guy who did a study that concluded that no study ever proved that Q-tips were bad for your ears. I know Q-tips are probably bad for my ears, but they feel so good, so whenever my wife brings up that I should stop using them, I always refer her to that one guy who tried to prove that Q-tips weren't that bad.
Perhaps it's just user error, but if you compact the wax in your ear by shoving stuff into it then you'll be in for a world of pain when the doctor uses a watergun to uncompact it.
Don't know, I've been doing it for 20+ years. My ears seem fine.
I did have to unwax them a while back like 12 years ago, it's not unpleasant, you put a liquid in your ear, and it reacts with the wax and it starts to bubble in a tingly way. It feels all weird. And then you squirt some warm water to remove everything.
I think it's fascinating that lack of information can generate both belief and disbelief in equal amounts.
For example, it took a while for germ theory to gain acceptance. People cannot see germs, so it's hard to believe in then. But people also fervently believe in ghosts and bad luck, neither of which can be seen.
Both are ultimately "caused" by a lack of information. When the lack itself is enticing because it creates mystery, it invites fantastic theories and superstition, but if it's not, it generates doubt and resistance.
Conspiracy theories resonate because you can always form a picture that explains the mystery in an enticing way in the same primitive way that weather must be created by the gods and ghosts are responsible for strange sounds in the attic.
This kind of dichotomy between credulity and incredulity is seen everywhere where humans need to deal with the absence of clear information. What I find fascinating is that while science has given us tons of powerful tools to reveal the unseen, we are still so powerfully drawn to the opposite side.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool”.
This comes off as borderline hagiography, when the answer is pretty clear. People figured out that chronic smoking was bad for you a LONG time ago, the reason that understanding was undermined rebutted had nothing to do with science, and everything to do with money.
R. A. Fisher developed many of the foundational techniques of modern statistics in an attempt to support his odious beliefs in “racial hierarchy.”
There is much to learn from considering this reality, but most will dismiss it as irrelevant.
Can you provide evidence of this strong claim? It looks like you’re conflating his population genetics work with eugenics/race science (which in turn have significant differences that I won’t go into).
>There is much to learn from considering this reality
Like what?
It's kind of the same situation with alcohol now: a lot of people denouncing it, the alcohol industry throwing a lot of shade, and top scientists making confident pronouncements (on both sides).
> for whatever reason, cigarettes were a conservative cause
For.. the.. money?
Money is a very conservative cause. Anything that gets in the way of money is "terrorist" and "commonism" (sic).
It should be noted, tobacco was the cash crop that finally made England's American adventure profitsble. Without it, we euro-americans might be speaking french or Spanish across all of north america now...
Does it even need to be that analytical? Conservatism can also also be general skepticism of change. And I don't know if you've ever tried to quit nicotine before but it's very good at convincing you it's a relatively harmless habit that helps cope with all sorts of stress and anxiety. If you're already inclined to be generally skeptical of change, smoking would slot right in there.
That said I'm curious if we're projecting back strong moralistic or party/ideology-aligned takes on smoking before it was really prevalent. I don't think anyone is questioning the role money plays in broadly misleading the public about smoking itself, just that the ideological/partisan divide such as it exists today might not map cleanly to the past.
See also James Watson, Nobel winner for discovering DNA, who continues to make racist remarks despite scientific evidence that he's incorrect. This has unsurprisingly led to the complete destruction of his reputation and considerable loss of income. People don't need financial incentives to be wrong, apparently.
See also: Linus Pauling and vitamin C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research...
> But then this just pushes the question back one step: How could this brilliant statistician be so naive?
I would suggest that if they're taking money to spout bad science, they're not actually brilliant. So I would suggest this pushes the question back yet further, why do we (still?) think he was brilliant?
The guy seems like kinda a dick. But here's what Wikipedia says Fisher is known for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher
Fisher's exact test; Fisher's inequality; Fisher's principle; Fisher's geometric model; Fisher's Iris data set; Fisher's linear discriminant; Fisher's equation; Fisher information; Fisher's method; Fisherian runaway; Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection; Fisher's noncentral hypergeometric distribution; Fisher's z-distribution; Fisher transformation; Fisher consistency; F-distribution; F-test; Fisher–Tippett distribution; Fisher–Tippett–Gnedenko theorem; Fisher–Yates shuffle; Fisher–Race blood group system; Behrens–Fisher problem; Cornish–Fisher expansion; von Mises–Fisher distribution; family allowance; Wright–Fisher model; Ancillary statistic; Fiducial inference; Intraclass correlation; Infinitesimal model; Inverse probability; Lady tasting tea; Null hypothesis; Maximum likelihood estimation; Neutral theory of molecular evolution; Particulate inheritance; p-value; Random effects model; Relative species abundance; Reproductive value; Sexy son hypothesis; Sufficient statistic; Analysis of variance; Variance
That's a pretty long list of achievements.
Why? Why do people insist that brilliance means some moral purity? What makes brilliance and greed impossible together?
You can be brilliant and greedy. The point at which you're making statements based on your greed rather than your brilliance, that's the line we stop saying they're brilliant.
Look him up, perhaps. If you’re a geek, nontrivial parts of your profession wouldn’t be possible without him.
I do not subscribe to the "great men" theory of history. Independent rediscovery has happened over and over again. If not him, someone else would have come about with the same discoveries.
It's fine to question that "great men" are the prime movers of history. But you're taking it too far by saying something like "all discoveries would have been made by someone else so individuals get no credit". First, that's obviously not true -- we can't know that every bit of knowledge would have been discovered by someone else. Second, it's beside the point -- the discoveries weren't made by someone else.
"Great men" vs. "impersonal historical process" is one of those dichotomies that will never be resolved. If you find yourself at either extreme, you're making an obvious error. Find a comfortable place somewhere in the middle.
So invention itself is not laudable because it’s inevitable? That’s an odd attitude. Newton’s laws of motion would have been discovered by someone, somewhere, so there’s no point in remembering and praising Newton for his work? It’s nihilistic.
> So I would suggest this pushes the question back yet further, why do we (still?) think he was brilliant?
Because he (mostly single-handedly) invented modern statistics.
Gelman comes down pretty hard on Fisher here but he doesn't question his brilliance.
See also Serge Lang on HIV/AIDS.
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Money. Obviously.
Thought-terminating cliches prevent you from finding much more interesting causes of disreputable behavior.
And looking for a deeper meaning in something this shallow prevents you from actually answering the question.
I’m honestly baffled by how swiftly everyone demonizes cigarettes as the ultimate evil, as if that’s a done deal.
Whenever group-think is this loud, it’s a huge red flag we should crack open the raw data ourselves. Fisher wasn’t some mustache-twirling villain, just a stubborn contrarian pushing against the orthodoxy. And if Big Tobacco slipped him a check, that doesn’t automatically nuke his math.
Correlation hype is easy, real causation proof is hard, and I’d love to see all the data and methodology. We don’t push science forward by chanting from the same hymn book. We do it by asking hard, unpopular questions.
> I’d love to see all the data and methodology
What stops you from looking at it?
> just a stubborn contrarian pushing against the orthodoxy.
It's not enough to be a contrarian, you also have to be right. Acknowledging that cigarettes are bad isn't "group think", it's an easy consensus because the evidence at every level, scientific, personal is very clear. Just walk up a bunch of stairs with a heavy smoker.
People who constantly act contrarian because they cannot accept that orthodox opinions are, most of the time, established opinion for decent reasons are both annoying and especially these days a blight on public discourse. They don't move science forward (forward progress is by definition only possible if matters are, at some point, actually settled instead of repeated for eternity), they try to get attention by standing out.
And of course companies tend to use these people because they can easily become useful idiots, it's no surprise that there's an entire cottage industry of "heterodox thinkers" these days. The book in the article, Merchants of Doubt, gives some great examples on this in regards to pollution and climate change denial.
The science has been done, and the results are publicly available. You're free to avail yourself of it at your leisure.
I'll bite. The science, as far as I understand it, clearly demonstrates the addictive properties of nicotine and the negative health effects of smoking.
The alternative theory I've heard is that there are secondary benefits to moderate consumption of cigarettes (moderate in this case being three to five per day) due to appetite suppression and creation of a 3rd place accessible during working hours. Some would also suggest that, at least in institutional environments (hospitals, universities, corporate campuses and manufacturing facilities), the food court/cafeteria and the accompanying array of fast food have replaced the cigarette break.
In this view, we haven't really solved any problems. We've just shifted the damage into a form that society finds to be more palatable. What if we could bring back the cigarette break and in the process boost people's community engagement, mental health and significantly reduce the obesity epidemic all in one hrrrm...
Welcome to my favorite PubMed rabbit hole.
TL:DR; The way that most tobacco is produced causes it to contain Polonium-210. Can we at least agree that putting Polonium-210 into the human body is not great?
https://www.google.com/search?q=pubmed+tobacco+polonium
Have we done a RCT on polonium ingestion? All I'm asking for is a consistent epistemological threshold. Justifying belief based on what amounts to a scientific "vibe" isn't rational knowledge independent of its veracity.
I am not sure that you are arguing in good faith.
Click the first link from 1964, look up the dosage in rems. Then look up the lethality of that amount of radiation, noting that the effects of radiation are largely cumulative.
If you want to find something actually interesting in all of this, read this piece about this industry reaction.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18633078/
Or, generally try to learn where the Polonium appears to come from in the process. That is super interesting and also covered in those google results.
I've conversed on this before. Inconsistent justifications for beliefs undermines science.
It's no different than insisting that belief in a drug's efficacy rests on RCTs. I'm legitimately unfamiliar with polonium ingestion trials so I don't have a justification for believing that it is harmful.
I want to be very clear that I'm not arguing that polonium isn't harmful - I believe it is. I just don't have justification for that belief. I believe that it's important to understand the difference between true beliefs and justified true beliefs.
Do I accept as fact that polonium is radioactive? Yes. Do I accept as fact that radioactive elements are poisonous to humans when absorbed? Yes. Do I accept as fact that Polonium from inhaled smoke particles will be absorbed? Yes.
Which part do you see as an unjustified belief?
The logical positivism part. It brings with it a host of assumptions. Of course, you're free to believe in them, but I don't think logical positivism is justifiable. That's generally why science today is built on falsifiability rather than verifiability.
I understand this thread started with you objecting to the assumption that polonium is harmful to humans. Going so far as to suggest that anything short of an RCT is not enough.
Yet even if I read RCT results concluding polonium to be harmless, I would distrust that conclusion, not my understanding.
Somehow we're doing this epistemology thing differently. It feels to me like you live in a world of impossibly high standards. Or you just like to argue hypotheticals.
We can agree.